Marketing Advice

As a marketer, I dig inbound marketing. And when I speak to salespeople whose marketing teams use inbound marketing, they really, really, really like inbound marketing.

Why would sales care about what marketing strategy you use? They care because the inbound marketing strategy works and it gives your sales team precisely what they want. Just a hint: they don't really want leads. (Stick with me here).

I recently started looking at home automation, and I got into it quickly. Bear in mind; this is years after Alec Baldwin began shilling for Amazon Echo. I never really saw the need for home automation, until I saw the need for it.

I have to admit I went a bit crazy on the subject, I am glad we have Prime for all the shipping!

That is how a lot of companies see inbound marketing. You keep hearing it is valuable but nothing has grabbed you about it, or you don’t have buy-in from the boss, or you have other projects that get in the way. Whatever. It has remained a “hmmm that would be nice."

Welcome to the last part of our inbound marketing series. If you have missed any, feel free to go to the start
of the series here.

The final part of the
inbound marketing campaign is reporting the results. That can be scary, right? Maybe you didn’t get the results you wanted. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t have the greatest results from your first campaign. Sometimes it hits the very first time, and sometimes it takes a while to build the results that you want. After all, if inbound marketing were easy everybody would do it, right?

Search engines determine what a blog or website page are about from keywords. For instance, if you write a page about "material handling space saving in Charlotte" then you are more likely to rank higher on Google for those keywords.

However, I find that a lot of companies try to rank for simple keywords instead of "long-tail keywords."

Let me illustrate.

A few years ago I was talking to a business owner about his website. It was a financial services business, and he wanted to increase organic traffic. For the sake of anonymity let's say his name was Mike.

Welcome to the fifth installment of our guide to inbound marketing. By this time your inbound marketing campaigns should be picking up speed. By the way, if you aren’t caught up in the series you
can start at the beginning.

In the last step, you created some excellent collateral. Now you need to help promote it with blog posts that are related.

Content creation is a pretty big deal in industrial marketing. You can recycle old content and create new innovative content. You can lead people to your site, resulting in more leads and opportunities from content marketing.

Thanks for joining us again on our Guide to Inbound Marketing series. Today we are going to talk about lead nurturing. If you haven’t already done so check out the first post for the beginning of your inbound marketing plan.

Our last step was about creating our collateral and landing page. You have built your great content and landing page; now you have some leads.

Awesome!

Keep in mind, your inbound campaign does not stop when someone converts on your landing page. Today most people go through more than half of the funnel by themselves before talking to anyone from your company.